[OT] Smartd: Worth the effort?

[Brian Fahrlander]

On Sun, 2004-08-29 at 15:46, Ben Steeves wrote:

> smartd is just an interface to the SMART capabilities of the drive. 
> Smartd can't tell you your drive is going to fail if the drive isn't
> capable of detecting the problem.

    Well, for years (until very recently) it's taken upon itself to
announce when bytes in the array change...even though it never bothered
to identify what those bytes mean.  

    And on the homepage itself, it says this mechanisim was designed to
alert _him_ on the status of drives in a large Beowulf cluster in
Wisconsin.

    Sure, it won't have a gui, something to ring a cellpone with the
message or anything, but it has a long history of letting me know
changes in status; how hard would it be to let me know that a read/write
failed?  That does seem to be why it was created, according to the
author.

    I understand where you're coming from; it's meant as a delivery
mechanism, not a presentation mechanism (see also /proc entries versus a
program like gkrellm).  But for years it's found time and ways to alert
me to innocuous changes with little/no documentation with them- so I was
naturally expecting something when the drive actually died, ya know?

-- 
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Brian Fahrländer                  Christian, Conservative, and Technomad
Evansville, IN                                 http://www.fahrlander.net
ICQ 5119262
AIM: WheelDweller
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